{"product_id":"empire-of-blue-water-isbn-9780307236616","title":"Empire of Blue Water","description":"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eNEW YORK TIMES\u003c\/i\u003e BESTSELLER • “Talty’s vigorous history of seventeenth-century pirates of the Caribbean [is] a pleasure to read from bow to stern.”—\u003ci\u003eEntertainment Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e“In Stephan Talty’s hands, the brilliant Captain Morgan, wicked and cutthroat though he was, proves an irresistible hero. . . . A thrilling and fascinating adventure.”—Caroline Alexander, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Endurance\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe Bounty\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe passion and violence of the age of exploration and empire come to vivid life in this story of the legendary pirate who took on the greatest military power on earth with a ragtag bunch of renegades. Awash with bloody battles, political intrigues, natural disaster, and a cast of characters more compelling, bizarre, and memorable than any found in a Hollywood swashbuckler, \u003ci\u003eEmpire of Blue Water\u003c\/i\u003e brilliantly re-creates the life and times of Henry Morgan and the real pirates of the Caribbean.“A swashbuckling adventure . . . [the] characters leap to life.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eNew York  Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A ripping yarn, worthy of its gaudy subject.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eDallas Morning  News\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A sparkling and engrossing adventure narrative.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eBoston Phoenix\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Fresh  insight into pirates’ dens of old . . . Well-researched nonfiction that reads like  a novel.”\u003cb\u003e—\u003ci\u003eWashington Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e“Rollicking . . . with style and energy Talty  tells a tale of boundless wickedness.”\u003cb\u003e—William M. Fowler, author of \u003ci\u003eEmpires at  War\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Stephan  Talty’s new book serves up swashbuckling history at its briny, blood-soaked best,  with enough violence and passion to keep the pages flying by. But it’s not only blood  and swash: \u003ci\u003eEmpire of Blue Water\u003c\/i\u003e is also a mirror to our own times, showing that attempting  globalization against a backdrop of the clash of civilizations is nothing new,and  that religious violence is often a thinly veiled cover for greed and personal ambition.  Talty's portrait of the legendary privateer Henry Morgan is a marvelous study in  contradictions—a man of astounding heroism, brilliance, compassion, and charm, who  was also capable of the greatest betrayal.”\u003cb\u003e—Tom Reiss, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Orientalist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A wickedly entertaining tale of pirates and the Caribbean seas they once ruled  like kings. Epic sea battles, daring adventures, rich history, great villains and  heroes alike—it’s a treasure.”\u003cb\u003e—Neal Bascomb, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Perfect Mile and Higher\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “In a riveting history that reads like the best novels, Stephan Talty stylishly  extricates the pirates of the Caribbean from the imprecise caricature that so often  consumes them. Layer by fascinating layer, Talty peels away the eye patch and theshiver-me-timbers  brogue to reveal the raucous, complex and authentic buccaneers of the ‘Brethren  of the Coast.’ . . . Storytelling and history to be savored.”\u003cb\u003e—Buddy Levy, author  of \u003ci\u003eAmerican Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Engrossing . .  . a swashbuckling tale of how the history of the Americas was shaped by a small group  of daring brigands.”\u003cb\u003e—Matthew Brzezinski, author of \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eCasino Moscow\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A fascinating  look inside [a] glamorous and gritty world.”\u003cb\u003e—Les Standiford, author of \u003ci\u003eLast Train  to Paradise\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Exceptionally well-told . . . an exhilarating adventure in reading.”\u003cb\u003e—Kerry A. Trask, author of \u003ci\u003eBlack Hawk\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eStephen Talty\u003c\/b\u003e is the award-winning author of \u003ci\u003eAgent Garbo, Empire of Blue Water,\u003c\/i\u003e and other bestselling works of narrative nonfiction. His books have been made into two films, the Oscar-winning \u003ci\u003eCaptain Phillips \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eOnly the Brave\u003c\/i\u003e. He is also the author of two psychological thrillers, including the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003ebestseller \u003ci\u003eBlack Irish,\u003c\/i\u003e set in his hometown of Buffalo. He has written for \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Magazine, GQ,\u003c\/i\u003e and many other publications. Talty now lives outside New York City with his family.EMPIRE OF BLUE WATER\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I Offer a New World”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e      In the winter of 1654, a newly commissioned frigate named the Fagons was  dispatched from the ancient city of Portsmouth on a secret mission. Its  journey was short; it sailed around the southeast corner of England into  the quiet harbor of Deal. There at the dock waited the ship’s only cargo:  a forty-four-year-old Anglican rector named Thomas Gage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    It was rare in the Royal Navy of the time that a warship would be sent to  pick up a single man, and a mere country pastor at that. But Gage was a  unique figure in English life: A long-dreamt-of empire was about to be  launched in part because of a book he’d written fifteen years before; the  nation was preparing to send thousands of men to attack its archnemesis  inspired by things that Thomas Gage, and he alone, claimed to have seen  across the ocean. This mysterious man—no portrait survives to this  day—was, as befits his role in   this story, surrounded in life by controversy and black dread. He had  ready access to the most powerful man in the country, Oliver Cromwell;  indeed, the Fagons had been hastened around the corner of England “by  order of the Protector” himself, and the Venetian ambassador wrote in a  letter that Gage “had many secret conferences” with Cromwell in the months  leading up to the ship’s arrival. Before and after the mystery man  arrived, England’s leader had been found studying maps of far-off places,  and a globe of the world had appeared, without explanation, on his desk.  All because of the humble rector.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Gage’s past was crowded with ghosts; men had perished with his name on  their lips. The pastor came from a line of Englishmen who some considered  saboteurs and infidels, while others swore they were the souls of  Christian fortitude. Whether heroes or villains, the family had long since  disowned Thomas; one sibling said he strove to erase every last memory of  the man from his mind, while another wrote to a friend about “our  graceless brother,” whose actions “our whole family doth blush to behold.”  Thomas’s father had cut off his inheritance years before, warned him never  to return to England, even called him a lethal enemy, and Gage claimed  that his older brother, a military hero, had made good on his father’s  threat and actually tried to have him murdered. All this resulted from  Thomas Gage’s years of religious intrigue: On his word, three men had  recently been hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn prison, a procedure  whose savagery is not suggested by the surgical description of it. The  Fagons’ crew would not have welcomed Gage aboard the ship regardless of  his past; priests on a ship were a bad omen, as   it was believed that the great storm maker Satan sent tempests across the  oceans to drown them. The black-suited pastor, the man who hanged his own  friends, as the sole passenger? It couldn’t be good luck.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    As for the pastor, one can only imagine his thoughts as the frigate  appeared on the horizon, sunlight sparkling off the surface of its  twenty-two new brass guns. His writing life was behind him, and he  wouldn’t live to record his thoughts on this, the most momentous voyage of  his life. But surely he was flooded with memories; the ship was to take  him back across the ocean to a place of his youth, a place that had  disappointed him terribly and was yet now giving him a second chance at  glory. As always when trying to dip into Gage’s inner life, one must  consider his appetite for power; the black sheep of an illustrious family,  he hungered to make his name, and this would be his last shot. In the book  that had launched this voyage, he’d written insouciantly to the leader of  England, “To your Excellency I offer a New World.” Actually, he meant the  New World, and the appearance of the Fagons represented Oliver Cromwell’s  silent acceptance of the offer. As the ship touched the dock, Gage said  his good-byes to his wife and three children; he would never see them  again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The ship headed back to Portsmouth, where a fleet was being   fitted out for the expedition, an audacious spear that would be launched  from the shores of England aimed at the vitals of a great world empire. No  Englishman returned from its destination, or that at least was the legend:  The enemy guarded its treasure house closely, and even natives from the  nation that had conquered it needed to go through a long vetting process  for permission to set foot there. But Gage had lived and explored in the  forbidden kingdoms; it was said he was the only Englishman alive who had  done so and came back to tell about it. Still, Cromwell was taking an  extraordinary risk by trusting his expedition to the pastor’s stories: The  descriptions of the ports, the fortifications, the soldiers whom the  English fleet would soon face all originated within the memory of this  singular man. As he sailed into Portsmouth harbor after a quick voyage  aboard the Fagons, Gage would have looked at the ships spread across the  harbor and the feverish activity—the dinghies ferrying men and supplies to  the larger ships, the polishing of brass and repairing of rig and  sail—with deep satisfaction. I have done this, he must have said to  himself. This is God’s work and mine.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    M M M\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    After a century of neglect, Portsmouth was again thriving under the  expedition’s demands. Its population of a few thousand people had sided  with the Puritan Cromwell and his New Model Army against the forces of  Charles I in the recent, savage civil war, and now it was being repaid in  hard currency. The fleet of sixty ships was being repaired, outfitted, and  manned (but not supplied with food, which would soon present a problem) in  its docks. This meant a great deal of work in a time when the oceangoing  vessel was one of the most technologically advanced machines Western  societies produced; even small ships required the wood of hundreds of  trees and carried three miles or more of rope. The port swarmed with  activity, and the nautical grapevine hummed with a single question: Where  are they headed? It was a major fleet; it must have grand ambitions. The  most popular rumor held that Cromwell himself would arrive to lead the  expedition on a surprise attack against Rome, seat of the pope, known  simply to Protestants as “the Great Whore.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But when the signal gun was fired, echoing out from the town across the  slate-colored sea, and the expedition’s troops began lining up to board  the ships, the natives changed their minds. The army of approximately  2,500 men emerged from their lodgings and were judged, and judged harshly:  These were not the soldiers of Cromwell’s New Model Army, the famous  Roundheads, a force whose ferocity was matched by its discipline; to look  at them, these men came straight out of the gutter. Cutpurses, drunks,  “knights of the blade,” incipient murderers. “I believe they are not to be  paralleled in the world,” wrote Major Robert Sedgwick, who would later  command the men, or try to. “People so lazy and idle, as it cannot enter  into the heart of any Englishman, that such blood should run in the veins  of any born in England; so unworthy, so slothful, and basely secure: and  have, out of a strange kind of spirit, desired rather to die than to  live.” But there was one man on the ships, anonymous as yet to history,  who would give the lie to Sedgwick’s words. In the space of eight short  years, this brilliant leader would turn men like these stumblebums into  what were perhaps pound for pound the best fighting men in the world. He’d  boarded at Portsmouth or would join up later in the islands; the  historical record is unclear. Perhaps he even brushed by Gage on the  crowded deck as the fleet churned westward. His name was Henry Morgan.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Young Henry had been born in Wales in 1635 to a lesser branch of the  illustrious Morgans, growing up in either the village of Penkarne or in  Llanrhymney; Welsh genealogists remain locked in battle over which town  can claim him. Henry was certainly kin to the great Morgans of Tredegar,  members of the uchelwyr class, roughly translated as “the high ones.” A  family poet made the relationship between the main branch and the other  families clear around 1661:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And so LanRumney yet must bend the knee,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And from Tredegar fetch their pedigree.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The only portrait of the young Morgan (now hanging at Tredegar) shows him  as a plump-cheeked teenager, his chubby face framed by the rich brown  curls of a wig. He looked like a dandy who might chase low-born maids and  sponge off his father. Until, that is, you came to the eyes: They look out  of the portrait coolly—appraising, measuring, uninnocent.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The place that Morgan came from would not have gotten him   instant respect in London. Wales was considered a rustic outback, peopled  by farmers and a few squires connected by complex lines of kinship. To the  English the Welsh were “emotional, excitable people,” wrote one historian,  “whose taste for toasted cheese . . . was matched only by their devotion  to their tedious native patois and their even more tedious pedigrees”; the  cliché Welshman was a bumpkin “remote in his mountain fastnesses,  surviving on cheese and leeks, surrounded by goats and unpronounceable  names.” The English had a great deal of fun with the Welsh, most of it  related to cheese, but there was at least one area in which they showed  respect: warfare. Milton called Wales an “old, and haughty nation proud in  arms,” and the Welsh were known to be crack soldiers. Morgan himself came  from warrior stock; his two uncles, Thomas and   Edward, were mercenaries who had left home to fight in wars all over  Europe. When the Civil War broke out, Henry must have been told that the  two brothers had chosen opposite sides to fight on: Thomas enlisted with  Cromwell’s New Model Army, and Edward pledged allegiance to the Royalists  and King Charles I. As Thomas Gage had grown up hearing about martyrs and  Scripture, Morgan grew up in a home filled with stories of war.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Edward Morgan fought close to home, as captain-general of   the Royalist forces in South Wales, an important posting. Thomas Morgan  was even more successful during the war. This “little, shrill-voiced  choleric man” rose to become the right-hand man of Cromwell’s most trusted  general, George Monck, and was a key player in the attacks on Scotland and  Flanders. He was wounded twice but survived to become one of the heroes of  the war. Especially from Edward, who was posted close to Henry Morgan’s  home, young Henry would have learned the rudiments of siege tactics,  artillery, and attack   formations.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Judging from his later life, the young adventurer carried little of Gage’s  religious obsessions. The New World was for him a chance at riches and  respect. He knew he was never going to earn them in the learned  professions, as his meager education prevented those careers. “I left the  schools too young . . . ,” he’d later say, speaking of the law. “And have  been more used to the pike than the book.” A long wooden stick topped with  an iron spike, the pike was a vicious weapon commonly used in the English  Civil War, and pikemen were often stationed in the front line of an army  formation, ready to bear the brunt of a cavalry charge. Anyone who wielded  a pike had undoubtedly seen death up close.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The young warrior was traveling to the New World hell-bent on making his  fortune and advancing the fortunes of his family. His name especially was  precious to him; he’d later write, “ ‘God preserve your Honour’ is and  shall be the daily prayer of Henry   Morgan,” and he was famously tetchy about anyone who did not pay him the  proper respect. The chip on his shoulder and the fact that he had so  little schooling suggests that Henry Morgan did not grow up rich or  coddled in Wales; the early exit from school could also indicate the  extent to which normal life of the people there was thrown into chaos by  the successive civil wars that engulfed En-  gland during his boyhood years. In any case, he’d joined the expedition  with a burning desire to find the freedom to achieve his ends: adventure,  estates, position. The last two were the same things that the lesser  Morgans were forced to seek on bended knee from their more illustrious  relatives. In the New World, the twenty-year-old Morgan was not going to  bend his knee to anyone, unless it was to place it firmly on the neck of a  Spanish officer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Between these two men, Morgan and Gage—one dreaming of a religious empire,  the other of gold and vast estates—you have rather neatly summed up the  race for the New World.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    M M M\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The people of Portsmouth watched as the ships sailed, still mystified as  to what change this would bring in their nation’s fortunes. In fact, only  a chosen few knew the destination. The orders given to the commanders were  sealed and not to be opened until the fleet was under sail. Thomas Gage,  however, knew that the target lay to the west: on the island of Hispaniola.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The lands across the Atlantic had fascinated Western societies for  centuries. The ancient Greeks believed that the spirits of their heroes  left their bodies at the moment of death and traveled to the “Blessed  Islands” that dotted the distant waters, to reside there forever. To the  Englishman of the seventeenth century, the New World combined the wonders  of Shangri-la with the remoteness of Neptune. It was a place of  gobsmacking riches only hinted at by the laundry list of treasure the  Spanish had extracted: a gilded ruby eagle, weighing sixty-eight pounds  with enormous emeralds for eyes; the two Mayan orbs representing the sun  and moon respectively, one made of solid gold, the other of silver, and  both “as large as carriage wheels,” with crisp images of the animals  worked into the metal; the emeralds the size of a man’s fist. They’d even  discovered a mountain, Potosí, seemingly made wholly of silver, whose  gushing-forth of ore served “to chastise the Turk, humble the Moor, make  Flanders tremble and terrify England.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The New World that produced such wonders had been Spain’s for many  decades, ever since Pope Alexander VI stroked a line down the middle of a  map of the world dividing the non-Christianized   territories between Spain and Portugal. In 1494 the line of demarcation  was shifted to 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, giving Brazil  to Portugal and the rest of the lands, known and unknown, to Spain.  England, France, and the Netherlands—the other players in the great game  of empire—never agreed to the terms. In Cromwell’s justification for his  expedition to the New World, the division was called the pope’s  “ridiculous gift,” while King Francis I of France remarked acidly, “”I  should like to see the clause in Adam’s will that   excludes me from a share in the world.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Spain, however, had the power to enforce its wishes on all comers. It was  an unlikely hyperpower, whose lustrous façade hid a faltering ability. But  in 1654, as the leaders of the Hispaniola expedition, General Venables and  William Penn, set out for the Americas, Spain was still a behemoth, the  successor to Rome, and its control of the New World was largely  uncontested. For its holdings there, the monarchy had enforced a policy of  “no peace beyond the line,” meaning that all territories beyond Pope  Alexander’s line of demarcation were not governed by European peace  treaties. Spain and its enemies were to be considered in perpetual  conflict in the Caribbean and the Spanish Main—the mainland of South and  Central America. Although the Spanish kings declared this policy, the  truth was that events in the West Indies would influence both relations  between European nations and the treaties they negotiated.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Cromwell and his commanders wanted fervently to loosen Spain’s grip on the  riches of the Americas. Gage was their happy scout; his biography had  become the blueprint for the invasion. But it also told a vicious tale all  its own.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Thomas Gage grew up in a time of lethal battles between Protestants and  Catholics. His family had been part of the Catholic aristocracy since the  time of the House of Tudor; imagine the Kennedys in an age of virulent  suppression of the faith and you have their profile. Distantly related to  Sir Francis Bacon and Shakespeare, Gage’s forefather Sir John Gage had  been one of Henry VIII’s brilliant circle of young, ambitious men; his  star dimmed only when he did not fully support Henry’s divorce from  Catherine of Aragon, the flame-haired daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella  of Spain. The resulting break with the pope, who denied the divorce, led  Henry VIII to found the Church of England. The decision set Catholics and  Protestants at one another’s throats for centuries and became the crucial  moment for the Gage family: their fortunes would now rise and fall with  the Catholic faith in England. The internecine religious wars of the  following decades often had a Gage among their cast of characters: Sir  John was called back into service when the Catholic Mary rose to power;  his son Robert and his wife hid priests in their Surrey estate, at risk of  death; Robert’s son was arrested for planning to assassinate the  Protestant Elizabeth in the disastrous Babington plot, inspired by the  pope’s excommunication of Elizabeth and his offer   of absolution for anyone—“cook, brewer, baker, vintner, physician, grocer,  surgeon or other”—who would kill her. The conspirator was executed in  September 1586 for high treason, setting a standard for family devotion to  the faith.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    This was the atmosphere in which Thomas Gage grew up: renegade priests  from the Low Countries flung into secret hiding places at a knock on the  door; forbidden masses celebrated in dripping basements; whispers, intense  faith, deadly betrayals. His early life must have had something close to  the feeling of the earliest Christians’, and it clearly demanded a high  degree of both character and devotion. But Thomas rebelled against it,  leaving the Jesuit faith to which his family had devoted itself and  joining a hated rival: the   Dominicans. He was seeking the truth about God and man, and he believed  he’d found it. Afterward he received a letter from his father saying “that  I should never think to be welcome to my brothers   nor kindred in England nor to him, that I should not expect ever more to  hear from him, nor dare to see him if ever I returned to En-  gland, but expect that he’d set upon me even the Jesuits whom I had  deserted and opposed to chase me out of my country.” If one is to feel  sympathy for Gage at any point in his increasingly sordid life, one might  as well expend it the night he received his father’s letter, when he sat  disowned and nearly friendless in a foreign country. Thomas lay awake that  night, unable to sleep, and wept at his father’s words.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    By age twenty-five, Gage was studying at a Dominican monastery in Spain.  Soon he’d fallen under the spell of a commissary of the pope recruiting  young friars for service in the Philippines. The Spanish had centuries  before battled the Moors for control of Iberia and won; in their minds the  Crusades were still a going concern, and they were sending friars and  priests to the New World as soldiers of Christ. Gage signed up for the  mission and sailed for the New World in 1625.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The promised land of the Americas turned out to be far different from what  he expected. Instead of fighting for God’s kingdom, he’d found the friars  drunk and living like pashas. As he’d traveled through the empire, he’d  seen up close how its religious men lived; here he writes about the  disparity between how another order, the Franciscans, were supposed to  dress and what they actually wore:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The rules of the order of the Franciscans demanded that they wear  sackcloth and shirts of coarse wool, and that they go bare legged, shod  with wood or hemp; but these friars wore beneath their habits (which they  sometimes tucked up to the waist, the better to display such   splendor), shoes of fine Cordovan leather, fine silk stockings, drawers  with three inches of lace at the knee, Holland shirts and doublets quilted  with silk. They were fond of gambling, and acquainted with gamblers’ oaths.","brand":"Crown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300756345061,"sku":"NP9780307236616","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307236616.jpg?v=1767726228","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/empire-of-blue-water-isbn-9780307236616","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}